


Flesh Side

by cheshireArcher



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical The Flesh Content (The Magnus Archives), Gen, Infodumping, Medieval studies are hazardous to your health, Middle English, My apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), References to Chaucer, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), The Canterbury Tales - Freeform, manuscripts, oh hey the title matches the entity, that is entirely by chance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:33:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27494278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheshireArcher/pseuds/cheshireArcher
Summary: Statement of Theodore Forrester, regarding his experiences as a manuscript archivist at the British Library. Original statement given October 21, 2015.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3





	Flesh Side

**Author's Note:**

> For the first time in two years I write a fic about something other than the Middle Ages! Kinda. At least it doesn't take place in the Middle Ages. 
> 
> I've been listening to The Magnus Archives during work this year and it's amazing and of course I loved MAG017 The Boneturner's Tale.
> 
> The statement giver is an alternate version of me, and I tried to combine how I talk with Jon's writing style. I don't know if it worked or not. "Flesh side" refers to the side of skin parchment is made from that faced the animal's muscle, hence flesh.

_Statement of Theodore Forrester, regarding his experiences as a manuscript archivist at the British Library. Original statement given October 21, 2015. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist, the Magnus Institute, London._

_Statement begins._

I’m probably not the kind of person you usually get in here. I’m from America, I got a grant to help with the manuscript digitizing project at the British Library. Although now I wish I hadn’t. That I’d just stayed home. Then maybe none of this would have happened.

Maybe I should start again. Sorry if I’m rambling, I tend to do that. Ahem. My name is Theo Forrester and I’m a medievalist at Indiana University, Indiana, United States. I study manuscripts – mainly Middle English, but anything I can get my hands on, really. Manuscripts are so cool. It sounds cheesy but they’re like looking into another time. The people who wrote them probably didn’t think we’d care about them six hundred years later, but here we are. They have all sorts of neat stuff that tells you about their owners, if you pay attention. They’re all unique. What they chose to copy down, what they thought was worth making notes on, the mistakes they made and if they were corrected or not—sorry, got off track there.

My main job is using computers to preserve manuscripts. I’m an archivist too, though it’s probably not as exciting as whatever you do. Mostly scanning the pages and then entering into a database all the information about them. But I love it. Or I did.

I was working at the Library with a guy named Robert Knight. Appropriate name, since we were working on medieval books. We had a bunch of manuscripts that had just been acquired by the Library and needed to be entered into the catalog and eventually digitized. One of them stood out to me – it was the only Middle English book, all the others were Latin, and as I said Middle English is my specialty. I was especially excited to see that it bore some resemblance to the Ellesmere Chaucer.

The Ellesmere Chaucer is the best-known manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_. If you’ve ever seen a picture of Chaucer, you’ve probably seen the one in that manuscript. Little fat guy on a horse. Anyway, it’s a massively important manuscript and to see something that appeared to be a copy was intriguing to say the least.

It wasn’t just a copy. It was perfect. I don’t know how to describe it except… remember I said that manuscripts are all unique? That’s because they’re produced by hand, and no matter how hard you try to copy something exactly, something’s going to be different. A mistake in spelling. Letters different sizes. An errant stroke. Maybe you use “TH” rather than a thorn. Even the manuscript materials itself, the support, will be different. Parchment is made from animal skin, so it’s going to look different because skin is unique.

Sorry for rambling again. Just… I think this is all important to understand what I saw.

As I was making some notes about the new Chaucer, I compared it to the Ellesmere Chaucer, which is online. I couldn’t believe it, but every single thing, as far as I could tell, was identical. Not only was the copying as immaculate as the Blessed Mother, the parchment had wrinkles and marks and discolorations in all the same places. It was entirely impossible that two six-hundred-year-old manuscripts could be so identical, it was almost creepy. But I didn’t think much of it, I chalked it up to me probably seeing things because I was tired.

I spent probably more time than I should have studying this not-Ellesmere. Rob teased me about my new hyperfixation, saying I was “lost in the Chauce.” I kept flipping through the online version of the original Ellesmere hoping something would be different, but it still looked as if I had the Ellesmere both in front of me on my desk and on my computer screen. I tried several different computers – my laptop, some of the other computers at the Library, my iMac back at my flat, even my cell phone, thinking that a different screen would show me something I hadn’t noticed, but it all looked the same. By now I was completely bewildered, I was beginning to think I actually _was_ just seeing things, and I was seeing them as the same because I wanted to. I ruled out that this actually was the Ellesmere, as it wasn’t from the Huntington—it was from the collection of some old book collector here in England, and there was no way we’d been sent something by mistake. I almost went to my supervisor, Dr. Tara, about it, but… I don’t like not knowing things, and I didn’t want to look inexperienced.

Sorry for all that background, I know none of it seems important in light of… what happened. My own misgivings about this book aside, I tried to go back to working on it like a normal person, and not someone creeped out by a book. I’m not that nuts. Or I wasn’t at the time.

Sorry.

After a few days of looking far too closely at this book, I went back to my normal job of entering metadata and writing descriptions. That’s when I saw the… the one aberration. The thing that made my manuscript different from the Ellesmere. It had a part not in the Ellesmere, or any other manuscript for that matter. It was simply titled “The Boneturner’s Tale.” This pilgrim didn’t have an introduction in the General Prologue – not completely odd, since not all the pilgrims actually get much by the way of introduction, and the Canon’s Yeoman doesn’t get a mention in the Prologue because he’s not at the Tabard when the _Tales_ begin. 

It was written in prose, like “The Tale of Sir Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale,” and it wasn’t a tale told by a pilgrim, rather it was about a pilgrim – much like the prologues and epilogues some of the tales have, where the pilgrims react to a story and get ready to tell another one. This… this was nothing like the _Canterbury Tales_ though. I’ve never read anything like it, outside of creepypasta—and medieval literature can get weird.

The Boneturner, or the Bonesmith, or the Turner, he’s called several things in it, didn’t seem to be one of the pilgrims, so I guess he’s like the Canon’s Yeoman in that regard. He watches the pilgrims as they come into a town and he just… watches them, for most of it. It’s really unsettling. See, so much of the genius of Chaucer’s original is that he’s such a good observer of his fellow travelers. His self-insert character, who isn’t Geoffrey Chaucer the civil servant-turned-poet, but a possibly dim guy also named Chaucer, spends a lot of the metanarrative reporting the antics of his party, and we have such lively images of them from him. But the Boneturner… ecchh. It’s really creepy what he picks up. The Cook, Roger, looks at the Pardoner funny, like the way he looks at a piece of meat he might cook. The Parson seems sickened by the Nuns. And… ugh, it makes _me_ sick to think about it, okay? It’s really kind of weird though that nowhere does it mention Chaucer. He’s just not there. Maybe for the better.

The part that stands out the most was this part where they’ve stopped for the night, and everyone’s asleep except for the Boneturner. He sneaks up to Robin, the Miller, and… oh God, I almost can’t even think about it. The Boneturner… somehow reaches into the… the Miller’s body and… starts taking out his bones. All I can imagine is it’s like that scene in _Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom_ where the evil priest guy reaches into a human sacrifice’s chest while he’s still alive and pulls out his heart. Yeah, that’s all I can do to describe it, sorry for the digression. I remember one line, it’s stuck in my head – “and from hits rybbe a floute forto floytene þat reuelous toun of marwe took.” “And from his rib he took a flute to play that joyful tune of marrow.” Yeah it grossed me out too. And, uh, the Miller died from that. I think he did something to the Cook and the Summoner too.

The other thing that stands out besides this gory little scene is that it has an illustration of the Boneturner, just like the Ellesmere has illustrations of the regular characters. I’d include a picture of it but—uh, you’ll know why I don’t have one in a second. There was another illustration, this one of a demon. Demons are pretty common in medieval manuscripts, and even one of the _Tales_ has to do with one, “The Friar’s Tale,” which is about a corrupt summoner who makes a deal with a devil and of course he loses. Plus there’s Satan in “The Summoner’s Prologue,” and Friars come out of come out of Satan’s ass. Told you medieval lit can be weird. Anyway this demon picture. I don’t remember there being a demon illustrated in the Ellesmere, correct me if I’m wrong, but this one had a demon. There was a marginal note that I think was supposed to be the demon’s name. Something like “Asag” or “Asad,” I can’t remember at this point and I can’t check.

Um, so this was all pretty freaky and I couldn’t make myself read anymore of “The Boneturner’s Tale.” I was so shaken by it I didn’t go into work the day after, I said I was sick, which wasn’t too far from the truth. When I did go into work at the British Library, the manuscript department was closed and there were police all over the place. They told me that there had been a murder. It was my coworker Rob. He—he’d been working the evening before and he’d been—. I saw the police reports later. Somehow multiple bones had been… removed from his body, but there were no signs that anyone had actually cut him open to get at the bones. I didn’t make the connection ‘til I finally got into the room after the crime scene had been cleared and I saw the false-Chaucer on the table. Apparently Rob had been digitizing its pages when… whatever it was killed him.

I looked through the computer files but they were all corrupted, and I couldn’t find any backups. I’m not sure what good finding the scans would have done, but it kept me occupied for a while. Then it hit me that whatever happened to Rob was what had happened to the Miller in that awful Chaucer gore fanfic that I’d stumbled upon. That was a terrifying realization and I think it really did something to me. I destroyed all my notes about the manuscript—what I’d written in my notebook I burned and the ones on my hard drive… I smashed the hard drive as much as I could and added the pieces to the fire, hoping they’d melt. I didn’t want anything to do with that manuscript, and I was quite frankly now afraid of whatever power it held. It had killed one person and I felt incredibly guilty for that—I hadn’t been around when he’d been working on it, maybe I could have warned him there was something wrong and maybe he’d be alive now. Or maybe I’d be dead too. Anyway, I destroyed everything about the manuscript I could find and in my crazed state I would have destroyed it too, priceless medieval manuscript or not, but I couldn’t find it anywhere in the Library. There was no sign it had ever been acquired. I’m afraid now. Afraid for whoever reads that manuscript and catches the interest of the Boneturner.

_Statement ends._

_Well. Now we know the origin of_ The Boneturner’s Tale _that Sebastian Adekoya encountered in Case 999106. It seems this nightmarish Chaucer isn’t some modern-day creation, rather actually from the Middle Ages, if Mr. Forrester is to be believed. Robert Knight did indeed die August 27, 2015, though his death was ruled an accident. I got Tim to dig up the police report to see if Mr. Forrester is telling the truth. It seems it was indeed an accident – if they for some reason kept a steamroller in the British Library. Mr. Forrester’s claims that Mr. Knight was missing several bones appears to be true. Perhaps Jared Hopworth continues to terrorize librarians. I assume that the book collector mentioned at the beginning of the statement is Jurgen Leitner. I’ll have Sasha find out if any other medieval manuscripts are known to have been in Leitner’s possession. I had Martin try a follow-up with Mr. Forrester, who’s now back in America. He refused to give a follow-up statement, saying, quote “No, no, God, no, don’t talk to me about that.” At least he’s still alive, which is more than I can say the last statement giver to have a run-in with the Boneturner._

_Recording ends._


End file.
